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| Model with Unfinished Self Portrait, 1977 |
Isn’t it
peculiar that, for the longest time, I thought David Hockney nothing more than
a pro-tobacco campaigner?
To this day, when I think of “our greatest living artist” (the slightly
grovelling title now commonly attributed to him in the post Lucian Freud world),
I first picture a Pall Mall ciggy with a mop of blond hair and the trademark sartorial
tortoiseshell specs. Perish the thought.
London
can’t get enough of Hockney, the prodigal Northern son. This was the repeated
lament of my Sunday companion, who protested most heartily at being dragged to
yet another Hockney retrospective. I can certainly see his point of view. Just
a few months ago, the Royal Academy paraded eighty Hockney portraits – and, a
mere three years prior to that, hosted a swaggering show of his late
landscapes. It seems barely a few months ever go by without something of good
old David’s gracing some grand, colonnaded space between the Mall and Pimlico.
He has infiltrated the national consciousness in the manner of his own icons –
everyone can recognise the figure in the pool, the flecks of chlorine froth
upon the Mondrian-esque abstraction. City bourgeoisie yuppies defend a
favourite print over Napa shiraz at dinner gatherings. We can see his ‘Wolds
beaming guilelessly during the otherwise grey traipse from cubicle to loo. It
is certainly no surprise that the current retrospective is the fastest selling
exhibit in Tate history; after all, it is for the same reasons of foggy
familiarity that La Traviata continuously sells out season after season.
Why, then,
are we not sick to the teeth of his sun-soaked frolics? The answer (to me) seems
simple: joy, sheer and unadulterated. Hockney’s art inhabits a curious world
where even moroseness and abandonment are veiled by a gossamer haze of mischief
and abstract placidity. It stands out as decidedly un-British and, in lazy
comparison to his most significant peer in Freud, Hockney’s art has a primary
humanity and visceral heartwarmth that Freud’s more relentless approach cannot
match (for direct comparison, proceed downstairs at Tate Britain to the final
room of the Queer British Art exhibit, where works of both glare across
the walls and you can “smell the balls”).
When I
entered the Hockney exhibit, it was with a dreamy eye and induced serenity. The
first room is an exorbitant overture; the grand prologue. Alive here the
components of the possible impossibility that comprises the gentle, post-coital
glow of Hockney’s art. It is present in the breathtakingly tender male beauty
of the supine figure in Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait, the
intrusive warmth of which is later re-seen in Schlesinger’s detached profile (Portrait
of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)) and the coy archness of Ossie Clark’s
gaze. It is in the gentle teasing of the absurd and preposterous, which is
manifest even in the near childlike graffiti of his Royal College days. Disbelief is suspended, the improbable is bare but unquestioned; because in one fell swoop, we stop being playthings of memory and hateful of the marvellous.
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| Play within a Play, 1963 |
It is the
abiding themes which are irrevocably Hockney that stay in my mind. It’s like
that much-abused Allen question; what are the things that make life worth
living? Hockney provides his own tailored answer in the luxuriant sweep of his
brushstroke, persistently throughout his voyage through adolescent
semi-abstract protest, to Californian masturbatory abstraction, to naturalism
and late Cubism. It is:
- The indulgent sink of Ossie’s feet into the gleaming white rug
- The wild spangle of pink and turquoise adorning the Californian hills behind Peter Schlesinger
- The thirsty delirium of the Canyon-side dirt paths
- The demonic phallic possibility of a Play within a Play
- The cackling derision of Colgate and Vaseline
- The unreal pre-Raphaelite and glazed depiction of Celia Birtwell, at once discordant and fecund against her partner’s immediacy
- The rebirth and reinvigoration of beauty in the inanimate dually alongside an abstraction of the distance between human subjects
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| Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool, 1966 |
As for Hockney’s
later works, there is perhaps some credence to the view that, “In some
senses, the subsequent 40 years of Hockney’s career look like a series of
heroic attempts and strategies to manufacture the intensity of his early years”.
Yet, this dismissal might be too unilateralist. With advancing age, Hockney’s
art seems to assume increased sanguineness, abandoning the shackles of
gleeful contrivement that mars the unproven and unrecognised. There is a wonderful, almost lyrical, arc to
the two mid-sized paintings of Breakfast at Malibu, Wednesday and
Sunday, 1989. In both, a window flanked veranda is set for tea. Wednesday
has two chairs and allegorical fussiness. Beyond the floor length glass lurks an ocean; vast, uncontained, ribbed. Its seizures melt into the greenish sky.
On Sunday, the chairs are withdrawn. The surface has been covered with sheened
titian. There is only the smallest strip of navy sky, below which stirs placid
crests. I moved from one to the other. And back. It was magnetically
compelling.
Days later,
I recalled the Malibu waves to a close friend on a transatlantic phone call,
though words were a poor imitation. They, recently sobered by the departure of loved
one, looked at the prints. Their perception was altogether different. Where I
had been assuaged by the calm of Sunday, they found artificial freedom
and a locked-up dream. The human activity of Wednesday, the milk jug
slightly off line, to them signalled comfort, as did the febrile activity of
the waves. Our conversation wandered, to an old man who feared death with spiteful
acuteness. We never returned to Hockney, but the understanding was clear.
As for my begrudging
Sunday companion – well, he stood over my shoulder watching the Malibu waves
for a good twenty minutes and didn’t complain once. I daresay he even rather
enjoyed it, as gauche and mainstream as he had previously made it sound. That encapsulates, I think, the enduring strength of Hockney's appeal; few can worm their way into public affections in such easy, unassuming manner. Even after all these years, it is easy to simply fall in love again.
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| Breakfast at Malibu, Wednesday, 1989 |
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| Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday, 1989 |
